


Where the air comes through.

by Aya_A_Anderson



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: 1000 word chapters, Hypersensitivity, M/M, author!furihata, majorly freeform, post-university AU, rated for sex/language/themes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2014-10-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 00:11:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2248683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aya_A_Anderson/pseuds/Aya_A_Anderson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seijuurou learns how to not think (and how not to think of Furihata Kouki).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Air

**Author's Note:**

> This is purely experimental and fun for me, and all the pairings I like but am not writing at the moment.

Sometimes, when he is very, very quiet, there is a voice that comes and talks to him and flares his bare bleeding mind into perpetual motion. Some words are more or less than said; strange greatness even here, Akashi believes, where the sun and concrete never touch. His mind slowly fills with water, and the words set his lungs burning. Fractured disparity in the spaces between where he sleeps and wakes – fragile-grand thought always grand always blown into a frenzy of a storm, and beyond the storm or perhaps born of it, the voice and pale glaring eyes of his own corpse, grand torture.

Akashi believes that no water that swallowed his breath could ever swallow thought all he needed swallowed up inflamed so he could die of braindeath in peace. They were all dying of braindeath, all of them, all the butchers and bakers and shopkeepers mothers the children and teachers in classrooms shadow-darkened with sleepless haze insomnia all black blank shuttered lips words words more he wants to breathe but all the rotting reek of coal and flame and half-mourning Akashi is loathed to call prayer or sadness and it isn’t terribly sad, nothing is anymore, and still some days Akashi cannot bring himself to venture outside into the fog where his breath clogs and burns words words gone until the voice swallows everything.

But sometimes-

take a breath –

the rush is clear.

He steps out into the bright, cool air, and the pins in his lips are loosened. He smiles at the barista, at the office secretary, spends less time churning through his near-indomitable workload and more looking down into the pulsing streets, or up into the grey-blue sky.

His meetings track as smoothly as ever, though his compatriots exit the conference appearing cheerful, vibrant in a way that causes Akashi concern over the common fear.

On those days, Akashi returns home to the penthouse and paces every room, his footprints bursting across dark silence. Everything is too cold, too cold, he wants something he cannot draw himself desperate-thin enough to name.

 

..

 

There’s some desire there. Akashi knows he is more socio-sexually withdrawn than most men and women his age, but he has never considered this an impediment, or even a minor irritation. More than anything, his demanding nature was the true inconvenience of it. Since the age of fifteen, Akashi’s business education had swallowed away hours not spent studying for Todai entrance, eating, exercising or sleeping, and his friends were more semblances of matter than corporeal. They wafted about his head like breezy insects magnetized to light singularities. Nothing he would ever want to come to know, none better, nothing more than screen paper falling away with a brief shake.

On his bad days, numbering so many now Akashi isn’t sure they are any worse than normal, he feels nothing more than the single-minded burning of ambition and he works and bleeds all over Teiko mergers and fires blindindiscriminate until the world is empty at nine o’clock on a Friday night and he comes to, shuddering and packing his briefcase for home, his weekend-workplace full of breath.

The true inconvenience is that Akashi cannot confine his demand. He owns, and he doesn’t.

..

 

Sometimes Midorima comes over to visit. He barely looks at the wide grand piano these days, where Akashi dons leather ebony gloves to match his dark wool coat, and Midorima’s fingers are too numb to consider playing outside of his bright powdery conservatorium hall. His fingers are strapped and bandaged – Akashi sees spots of blood leaking through at the knuckles, where Midorima has been scratching. He says it’s involuntary – in his sleep. He looks at Akashi, the shadow around his eyes and held height of his jawline.

Midorima doesn’t walk any more than he shatters into motion, the jerky steps which at first had seemed almost endearing, which now stutter in the cryofrozen silence of Akashi and all the rooms and buildings Akashi inhabits – Midorima pours a glass of water for himself and for Akashi, and sits stiffly on the stiff cream leather of Akashi’s couch.

 

..

 

Sometimes, when he is very, very quiet, there is a voice that comes and talks to him.

 

..

 

“Dinner,” says Midorima, impatiently, “Would you like to come to dinner?”

“With whom?”

“A couple of my friends, and Kuroko.”

“Your friends?”

Midorima sniffs. “No need to sound so surprised,” he says. There’s some underlying sympathy, or perhaps empathy, for Midorima hadn’t always been as well liked as he is now. Akashi despises him.

“When is this dinner?”

“Friday night, 6:40, down at _Burgundy_.” He checks his watch, subconsciously.

Akashi likes _Burgundy_ , as much as he likes everything that’s a little too flashy. He nods very slowly.

Midorima then says something else, but Akashi can’t quite make out the words over the noise in his ears, and so ignores him til he leaves.

 

..

 

Sometimes he doesn’t know or remember to differentiate the two. Something else he doesn’t have. Own.

 

..


	2. A Treatise on the Trappings of Self

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is uncultured crap I'm sorry  
> warnings for name dropping ft. Takao

At 10:32 on this same night, Furihata Kouki is dumped by his girlfriend of two days. He has a harsh and seemingly unyielding tendency to either fall hard into infatuation, only for it to slide away into urgent boredom as the months pass, or to be dropped by a girl unimpressed by his lack of all exceptionally brilliant qualities but for his unyielding determination. After all, sports journalism isn’t the most lauded of all career paths in Japan – and whilst Kouki is five hundred words from completing what he fancies his magnum opus, impoverished artists are a hundred fold in Tokyo city and all chick appeal is lost by Monday-week.

Kouki really only knows Takao by extension, a friend of a friend from university who attends the same gatherings – an arts-media student who’d broken onto the film scene through an accumulated stroke of luck and genius; regardless, it’s Takao who finds him wandering listlessly through the park and back to his modestly decent and crushingly lonely apartment; Kouki later wonders whether fate is a concept so incredible as to be true, akin to tales of unrequited love his high school incarnation thought to be flights of passion-deprived intellectual fancy and fantasy.

Whether fate or coincidence, Takao finds him, instantly recognises him as that bland kid always writing – Kouki doesn’t take one-time blow jobs followed by fumbling in the back of an Audi into account: matters of normalcy for Takao Kazunari – Kouki writes everywhere: at parties and clubs and that odd time at a gay bar Fukuda had dragged him out to and Kouki realises abruptly that he hasn’t seen Fukuda in over a year and realises just how much of the world he’s missed whilst aching after boys and girls and elusive writing contracts – and Takao takes Kouki home to Kouki’s flat and invites himself in and steals a beer from Kouki’s leaking, yellowed fridge and sits down on Kouki’s sofa before Kouki shuffles his splintered mind into an order neat enough to tell Takao all he wants is to be left the hell alone.

Kouki likes to wallow in peace and feel sorry for himself. It’s a near-ritual for him. A near-weekly ritual.

“Did you at least like this one?”

Kouki startles, and flushes, sickeningly ashamed. “Um. I think so. Maybe.”

It was a stutter he’d never grown out of, developed in the throes of middle school pushing and shoving: his tendency to stop and start and break off in the midst of phrases increasing proportionally to how nervous he felt and currently feels in spite of his alternate tendency to think in horribly rambling sentences.

“What did she say this time?” Takao asks, a smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. “Too boring? Too plain? Too uninspired? Did she read your work and call it unoriginal?”

“Shut up, Takao,” mumbles Kouki, “No.”

“What, then? Unless you broke up with her-”

“What do you think?” Kouki explodes. “She… she wanted to be taken care of, and I… You know.”

Takao barks out a laugh, flashgrinning, crowing, “I knew it! We-”

(the ‘we’, Kouki knows, meaning Kise and Takao)

“- wanted to start a betting pool – Shin-chan’s always right about everything. Except maybe himself. But why, Kouki! I thought girls liked all that blushy, vulnerable crap. Didn’t that, that Hana like the way you cry when you come?”

“No,” Kouki moans, burying his face in his hands. “They… they get tired of it. You know. It’s. It’s cute for a while, she said, but then. I. I think I’m giving up on them. Girls.”

“Me too,” says Takao, enthusiastically. Takao had given up on girls a while ago. “That’s why we’re friends, Kouki.”

‘Since when are we friends?’ Kouki wants to say, and then reconsiders Fukuda, reconsiders his lack of friends, and decides that beggars truly can’t be choosers, even if Takao’s probing obsession with his sex life was getting somewhat out of hand.

Takao is good at what he does. He’d given the best head out of anyone Kouki has ever slept with – though, that isn’t saying too much relative to the average twenty-two year old man, given his mere five partner history compared to Takao’s five-hundred – like it was his God-divined job to meet a regular quota. Quite frequently, Kouki wonders what it would be like to be Takao. He fantasises.

But Kouki really doesn’t want to be disowned.

So he dates girls to cover over the Kinsey Four silence, and the whole arrangement works about as well as duct taping your roof for the wet season.

“Okay. If you know. What do I do?”

Takao shrugs. “Find someone who likes you.” Says it like it’s easy as pie, and Kouki feels an unusual rush of anger and jealousy all smushed into an overwhelming and immovable mass in his stomach. “Go out with new people.”

“Like who,” says Kouki, morosely.

“Go out with me,” says Takao, “and my friends. All you hang around with are…”

“Straight people?”

“It’s not that they’re straight,” Takao consoles him, “but that they’re boring. Kuroko’s straight and he has a great time! You’ve just gotta take it easy, Kouki. Stop expecting yourself to have it all figured out.”

“I don’t… expect that. I want that. I don’t necessarily…”

“Stop, stop. Writers, they overthink everything. Not that it’s a bad thing,” he says hastily, “but it’s bad if you want to be happy.”

Kouki remains stubbornly silent, staring at his knees. He sits with his legs together, one ankle crossed primly over the other. There’s an uncomfortable pain in his back born of bad postured computer days filing resumes and writing articles. He needs something like an intervention, he thinks, but not a real intervention. He needs healthier food in his fridge and maybe a new space heater and to get up in the mornings and go for runs through the park.

“I need to stop falling in love,” says Kouki, with the expression of a prophet witnessing the second coming of the Messiah.

Takao barely disguises the rolling of his eyes as he says, “Yeah, okay. You’re worse than Murasakibara, I swear. You don’t know Murasakibara, right? Shin-chan’s friend. Anyway, he-”

Kouki lets Takao go off on his tangent about nutty people Kouki’s never met, and doodles a meal plan onto a notepad that’ll probably be thrown away with the next garbage collection.

..

 

Kouki and Takao go out the following night, and the next, and Takao practically hijacks his apartment for a formal not-quite-Spring-yet clean.

By Wednesday, Kouki is a man living on the verge.

On Thursday, Kouki is left utterly and blissfully alone – Takao stays the night with Kise and Midorima. Despite himself, Kouki spends the night Googling STIs and looking worriedly down at his own crotch.

 

..

 

On Friday afternoon, Takao breezes in, looking thoroughly pleased with himself.

“Right,” he says, “Kouki, make yourself look semi-decent, we’re going out.”

“Right,” breathes Kouki, “Where?”

“To show you the other side. Shin-chan told me to bring a plus one – it’s Akashi’s birthday.”

“Birthday. Birthday?” Kouki splutters. “I don’t. I don’t know Akashi! Who is Akashi?”

“Doesn’t matter! Akashi doesn’t know anyone either.”

Kouki thinks he should feel more indignant, given Takao’s insinuation that he and this Akashi would hit it off through commiseration upon the subject of their cumulative introversion. As it stands, he feels partway betrayed, and mostly resigned, and fully regretting ever imparting a fragment of his soul to Takao.  


	3. Breath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Akashi is a complex character.
> 
> All naming choices (first, last, honorifics) are deliberate.

The air is cool and black and cars sparkling like beads of light across a network of city and Akashi can see it all from above, a bird’s eye view on citybright pedestrians cooling on balconies laughing smoking winding home exhausted week to week. Akashi sighs it all in, watching his own breath puff out, staining the darkened glass of his driver’s car, rolls down the window and sighs and watches his breath buff out and mix with the autumn air smell of dying leaves and sleep. Across and down streets he doesn’t know or care to know, though he has lived in Tokyo for nearly his entire life, from five years old with an apartment and built-in tutor where he dreamed and saw, saw himself in twenty years exactly where he is today, all his dreams ever come true and yet and yet and yet.

Midorima is staring at him. Akashi’s nails viciously retract. He wants to kill Midorima. Kill something to kill the restless haze and despite it all he never wants to kill himself, for Akashi believes himself to be above it. His mind is too shock bright to die.

He sighs, all embarrassing, initiating reflex, he thinks, exhaling the smell of deadened, falling flowers. The autumn must be getting to him. When they arrive, Akashi’s driver opens the door for him and then washes clean away to stall in a waiting bay; when they arrive, Akashi steps out into the blinding night.

What strikes him first is the feeling of air on his skin. He is blinded in hypersensitivity. Every brush of wool and silk cloth against his arms is an explosion of sound and tonight the associated emotion is something like wonder, or something very close to it. Akashi is a blur as Midorima steers him through the door –

how does Midorima handle him, or why?

He is tea and air, everything is air.

Akashi is air, and Midorima holds him in a little jar fit to break.

-and every step feels hot and tight; the strain of inbred stillness stamped into his mind and heart pounding excessively.

“Sit down,” says Midorima, “You’re unnerving our guests.”

Akashi explodes back into blinding focus, expecting to see Takao Kazunari, and Kise Ryota, Midorima’s partner of six years.

In Ryota’s place is a young man with brown hair, skin rather pale, eyes huge in his drawn, rather unremarkable face.

“Have you slept recently?”

The young man blinks, flushing nervously. “I. No. Not really. Have you?”

Takao, who Akashi has only recently grown to tolerate, sniggers into the rim of his wineglass.

Akashi considers this, and says, “I have not. I presume your work is demanding?”

The young man casts around for assistance, cheeks growing steadily, charmingly redder as Akashi sits down across from him and Midorima signals a waiter.

“Furihata’s in sports journalism,” Takao supplies, “and he writes.”

Akashi scrutinises Furihata. Quite plain, but not terribly so. There is something in his eyes – steady, steady, like rock stranded high and clear above a deep sea. “Are you a skilled writer?”

“I’m not,” Furihata mumbles.

“He’s really good! Underrates himself,” says Takao, patting Furihata on the shoulder – Akashi sees him flinch back, an evident stranger to such exuberant physical contact. Perhaps a stranger to physical contact entirely – and Akashi shivers, in spite of himself, from nameless obsession.

“I’d be interested to read your work,” says Akashi, more for the sake of politeness than burning interest, in spite of Furihata’s somewhat endearing under-confidence. Day after day of endlessly clichéd overconfident yet dull businessmen, the heaving silence before a breath of fresh air. “My company is affiliated with a number of small publishing houses.”

He expects Furihata to blush and smile and thank him – instead, he looks sadder.

Akashi can relate.

Somehow.

And suddenly,

and it is very sudden, and odd, and horribly swooping and strange,

the world has shrunk into oblivion, and he feels as though he and Furihata are singular and separate from the rest.

Something in his expression, perhaps. An old desperation, that has Akashi tearing his hair out in clumps in the frozen early hours, screaming into bathwater –

“Thank you, Akashi-san. I’ll send you…”

Akashi passes his business card across the table, ignoring Midorima’s scowl; ‘no business transactions on your birthday,’he’d been told, time and time over.

“I’ll send you a… a manuscript,” Furihata finishes, lamely.

 

..

 

“Kouki,” says Akashi, “Furihata Kouki.”

“That’s it,” says Kouki.

“Who are you?”

“No one important. An average college graduate.”

“Don’t look that way, if you are merely average.”

“Um. What way? I can’t really help my face.”

“Like you are desperate for the world to end.”

Furihata laughs, genuine and surprised, and says, “I don’t look like that. My… My problems are pretty simple. Especially considering the things you must have to handle every day.”

“No,” says Akashi. “I feel, somehow, that you and I are very similar.” He doesn’t dare go so far as to say they are the same. He doesn’t know, quite yet. But Furihata is smiling and shaking his ducked, flushed head, and Akashi is drawn to him.

“No, we aren’t. But I appreciate that,” Furihata says.

 

..

 

“It was nice to meet you.”

Furihata bows to Akashi at the end of the night. He withdraws, removes himself from the tiny world they’ve rested in for the night – as if Takao and Midorima are smoke – and all that had ever come close was Kuroko and Kuroko had always been a morning star fading too fast into happiness and women. Kuroko and Furihata are complete, both of them, but Furihata is a foundation to be worked upon, whilst Kuroko might be some sort of starling.

“Likewise,” says Akashi. Come home with me, he wants to say, he aches, but knows he will later regret it, so he nods and leaves and feels stranger than he has in a very long while.

In truth, he feels quite normal.

 

 

 

End Note:

Furihata’s novel is average in plot and character. Akashi wonders how a man with as much depth as Kouki could develop figures so bland and ordinary.

His language is ecstatically, thrillingly beautiful.

Akashi sends it off immediately, with notes suggesting improvements, and then sends a message to Kouki, requesting to meet.

 

..

 

Kouki, Kouki, Kouki, Kouki. 


	4. Advantage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Furihata fucks his way to the top. I swear to god this isn’t cannibalism.  
> once I finish this I'll probably condense it all into a single chapter but for now bear with me I'm studying for entrance exams
> 
>  
> 
> ooohhh nooooo I found a typo  
> if you see typos please tell me  
> when you go back and read "you lack inexperience" it's really embarrassing double negatives suck

“Is this real gold?”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” Kouki repeats. He shifts gingerly, crossing his legs, feeling Akashi scrutinising every crease his weight forms in the plush leather couch. Akashi is a black and red suitspot on cream, his hair sliced with gel and striking against the pale of his narrow jawline. Akashi is at home in his house, or so it seems, Akashi is his home, the same backdrop contrast with startling points: the flushed heterochromia of his eyes, the ringed gold around his polished champagne glass.

“Relax,” he says, so it is almost a command, with the barest smile, “We are supposed to be celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?” But Kouki’s heart is trampling his ribs, stomach swaying –

“A prominent editor and friend of mine, Nijimura Shuuzou, has agreed to revise and publish your book, under your consultation.” Akashi smiles a flicker more as Kouki clutches his hands to his chest, to his mouth, and Kouki feels that he is falling hard and fast into the black in the very, very greatest and grandest way. “You will need to revise your characterisation. Your use of language is beautiful – perhaps the most beautiful I have ever read – but your Kisa’s interactions with Satoshi do neither of them, nor yourself, justice.”

“I know,” says Kouki, fighting through the block in his mouth, “I wasn’t sure how to make her mind… believable.”

Akashi looks at him for a long moment.

Kouki is struck, as he has been struck previously, by how beautiful Akashi is, the curve of his nose and jawline, the slant of his narrow shoulders, the cut of his waist, and he has wondered for nights and dreams whether his automatic, instantaneous infatuation with Akashi is due to his appearance and the smooth cadence of his voice, or due to Kouki’s eight month long period of abstinence.

Then Akashi reaches across, fingers long and thin, and cups Kouki’s chin more gently than Kouki had ever thought him capable of. Akashi’s thumb strokes a long, slow path down Kouki’s hot cheek.

“Are you sure?” says Kouki, tremulously. He trembles, too, to the soles of his unpolished shoes, for how fluid is the flame of Akashi in comparison to him, who might be published but will certainly be forgotten, this eternal incarnate face of another age he senses in Akashi Seijuurou?

“Yes.”

The word is blank and blunt. There is an ache in Akashi’s voice, an ache Kouki can only dream to touch, to experience for himself – to infuse such feeling into his writing would be akin to Joyce, to Milton, to Murakami.

He shudders and sighs.

 

..

 

If Akashi had been entirely truthful, he would have told Kouki, I want you – more than you; I want to consume you, the very soul of you.

 

..

 

Akashi traces his fingers down Kouki’s neck, his throat as he swallows, the hollow of it, and basks in the shiver that runs through him, and wants more, and bites the juncture of neck and shoulder, and Kouki shakes a dark yell slams from his lungs.

“I’ll warn you,” says Akashi, perfectly composed, “I am terribly hypersensitive.” He takes Kouki’s sweaty hands in his own, clasps them gently, and moves one to cup Akashi’s cheek.

Kouki shifts a shivering thumb across Akashi’s cheekbone – Akashi shivers, too, from the barest brush of skin and, emboldened, Kouki brushes Akashi’s crotch, fondling the zipper.

“Go on,” Akashi groans, breathless, and attacks the skin at Kouki’s ear, pushing him back against the plush cream couch which will certainly be dirtied if they do not move –

Kouki thumbs the drooling head of Akashi’s dick, and startles as Akashi comes instantly into his hand, dripping down across the shirt he’d had dry-cleaned specifically for tonight. Akashi doesn’t look embarrassed, to his great credit.

“You… did say you were… sensitive…”

“Don’t worry,” says Akashi. “In the meantime, you can prepare me.”

Kouki blanches – was Akashi _insinuating,_ and dare he ask, and stutters, “Ah, um, I-”

Akashi looks unimpressed. He rises smoothly, removing his trousers and boxers and placing them, neatly folded, on the end of the sofa. Kouki watches incredulous as Akashi pours himself a glass of wine, watches the curve of his ass through the glass of the penthouse staircase. Hastily, Kouki divests himself of clothing, arranging it into a haphazard pile, before Akashi returns with a small bottle of lubricant.

“If it would make you feel more comfortable, you may watch me prepare myself. If you lack experience, quite frankly, I would rather you learn through observation.”

“No, I… I’ve been with other… men… I…” Kouki decides, fuck it, why does he care, they’ve made it this far despite the hyperreality of the entire frame and slicks his – steadying – fingers with lube. Akashi is on top of him, knees either side of Kouki’s waist, and slowly unbuttons his shirt – Kouki thinks Akashi is the sort who likes to make a ritual of it, someone who has fucked before and often, who finds little fulfilment in words and pleasantries and talk, and Kouki rises on his elbows, hands suspended uncomfortably above his stomach, to take Akashi’s softened dick into his mouth.

He sucks a little, and tries to suck out the sadness.

Akashi whines and throws back his head, muttering, “Kouki, Kouki, Kouki…”

Kouki hums, and Akashi’s dick twitches against his tongue. The taste is as vile as ever, but it doesn’t really matter, particularly when Akashi’s lovely fingers wind into his hair and tug with great regard reserved for his scalp.

He slides his middle finger back, probing, and quickly finds Akashi’s hole – he presses in with some difficulty, tracing the sphincter and feeling him clench and loosen and breathe heavily as Kouki pushes in, and every touch sends a moan through him and Kouki hardens at the sight.

“How can you be so responsive?” Kouki breathes, crooking two fingers inside Akashi.

“An excess of neural connections,” Akashi breathes. He draws Kouki in for a kiss, expertly prying his lips apart with his tongue and swiping across his teeth in a way that should be gross, but ends up being pretty hot, merely because it’s Akashi.

“Of course,” Kouki shadows. He slides in a third finger and stretches, and thinks of his book, of how very much he owes this eccentric he is barely familiar with. Another thrill at the thought of publication and Akashi moans with the force of his fingers, clutching Kouki’s shoulders and drawing him closer, tighter, controlling.

“You are clean, yes?” Akashi asks, and Kouki wonders where the reason is when Akashi’s eyes are blank and glossy with tears and crazed gaze like Kouki is the most beautiful, the most precious, and Akashi himself needs him aches for him wants him.

And perhaps it is wishful thinking.

“Yeah,” says Kouki, “Yeah, I got tested last week.”

“So recently,” says Akashi, amused, and lowers himself onto Kouki’s dick.

Kouki whimpers, Akashi clenches around him, squeezes tight and swallows him like a snake coiling and swallowing, and Kouki cries, shuddering sobs harder than he’s ever cried before, and he drowns in Akashi, even as hypersensitive Akashi wails and bites down into his shoulder, bites into him, and they swallow each other in the fever of it.

 

..

 

“You don’t need to make her believable,” says Akashi.

“No one can relate to her.”

“We all aspire to greater things. Kisa is manifest of the human subconscious.”

“I didn’t think of her like that, when I wrote her. I still don’t,” says Kouki, forcefully. “She’s – normal. Or, she tries to be.”

Kouki and Seijuurou, lying together on Seijuurou’s bed, fingers tangled in each other, hair wet from the bath.

There’s a puzzled frown on his face as he looks at Kouki, sharp black angles and the moving fractured lines of passing cars in the city below. His golden eye is flat and dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> extra info if you want: 
> 
> Hypersensitivity – the sort that doesn't involve rashes and allergies and skin irritations – is an actual thing that actually exists, and is commonly associated with synaesthesia. It can also be very unpleasant.


	5. Nerves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Newly edited. 
> 
> Here's your WARNING: misogyny, past Dub!Con, female sterilisation, crass language and offensive/negative descriptors used in reference to sex, homosexuality and heterosexuality. Have fun, pc assholes.

When they first meet, Kise asks Akashi if he has ever loved someone.

Akashi had said no, for at the time, he hadn't. Kise had only vaguely known Kuroko at that point in time; Kuroko was a university acquaintance of Aomine Daiki’s, whom Kise knew by extension through Momoi Satsuki, who was dangling friends with Midorima whom Akashi had only vaguely known for a while - it was a tenuous, tumultuous extension. But tenuous and tumultuous Kise loved Kuroko Tetsuya at first drunken stare – Kise leaning all over Kuroko, trying in vain to kiss his cheek and then down his neck, and Kuroko had gently but firmly shunted him away and gone on to socialise with everyone and anyone but the men and women Akashi socialised with, faggots and dykes and swingers, all of them. 

He... Kuroko was just... so terribly effeminate. 

Akashi had never met anyone like him.

In truth, Akashi knew all his friends through the homosexual extension network: formulating through high schools and on again into university and further on into the workforce around and between shared hearts and privacies and somehow, unfathomably, bringing together every semi-open individual in a given city in hotels and clubs and parties and drugs. Six degrees of separation shrunk to three, even for the notoriously antisocial and aloof Akashi Seijuurou, and poor, heterosexual Kuroko Tetsuya had been squeezed ironically and accidentally in the midst of all his odd friends and their godforsaken chain that extended through every possible course and 'force imaginable. Granted, Kuroko had never shown a vested interest in women, and so Aomine had taken it as a given that whatever vested interest any common man might possess was non-existent, and so had Akashi.

Kuroko was charming and kind and, though not startlingly intelligent in the fashion of Midorima or Momoi, unusually engrossing. A bit of a hipster, with a combined degree in liberal arts and information technology, learning English in the hopes of migrating to America and chasing an endless wrecked dream and Akashi had wanted him, the endless dream of manic Kuroko exploding into talent and nothingness, disappearing as he did best, and Akashi hated people who wouldn’t do what they were told and had offered Kuroko a job straight out of college just to keep him in his sights.

Akashi’s college experience was notably choppy. He already knew where he was, where he was going – and not in the ordinary, idealistic twenty-something yuppie kind of way, but in the demanding headaches and files stacking high on his desk and drinking rum and expensive bourbon gifted by older, older friends. Six years of business law somehow translated into four years on the fast track in the way time could only translate for an Akashi, rolling over and over in the absolute pinnacle of his peers’ envy, these people who would barely look him in the eye let alone satisfy him through friendship.

His guiding professor had introduced Momoi Satsuki to him, Momoi who had ‘Statsuki’ printed neatly on the external cover of every book she owned and was known as such to almost everyone, Momoi the genius economics student who was reasonably old for her age and knew how to work, work, work.

No escape. Each night after school or work – Akashi’s work, the training process and underlings twice his age and cold stares; Akashi didn’t mind them, didn’t care for them, didn’t care almost as if he couldn’t care, he tried to care, he tried and sat and ached with the thought of caring and even when he thought about his father being slammed by a bus he didn’t care, regrettably – and Kuroko Tetsuya was always there and just beginning to cotton on to the fact that something wasn’t quite right when Kise started making out with Takao and Midorima in a disgusting triangle of feelings and Akashi had quietly brushed the hair out of Kuroko’s eyes and asked him if he was okay, he looked a bit queasy.

Queasy, like he was sick from it. Phobia. 

Kuroko’s the sort of memory who makes him wonder if his dead insides were the expense of a vibrant mind, skin aching whenever they touched and Akashi hates him, feels empty whenever he looks at him.

It was only loyalty and pity that kept Kuroko at work – he could earn less elsewhere, but to young Kuroko who sometimes felt so far and young and little like a future ghost or fading star and he doesn't care for money, middle class and content as he is. Akashi knows this.

Still, he sees Kuroko often enough. As the CFO, all department payments and innovations trickle upwards through him to his fast-ageing father, who Akashi knew would be relinquishing his role soon enough to sit calmly on the Board of Directors and be payed a fine sum for it whilst furthering his overseas ventures. Kuroko is there often, trickled upwards by Akashi and he makes Akashi angry, so angry Akashi’s skin starts itching and every handshake feels like an unnatural violation scraping his skin and grating at his dick and the marrow of his bones, seeing Kuroko Tetsuya calm Kuroko Saint Tetsuya with his lovely actuary girlfriend who’ll surely be ejected from the workforce with the first and from there every new ejection of her future husband’s semen the fucking whore: Kuroko, disgusted by Akashi’s but not so disgusting when it’s Kuroko’s own and Akashi could tell, he could read it in every twitch of her flushed face and giggles like a twelve year old hidden behind her lovely pay check all drizzled onto her perfectly manicured nails.

Fucking useless. Women, fucking useless, useless at fucking.

Akashi wonders, and wonders: do they lie dead and still, dead and still as men fuck them? Dead and still, like Kuroko lay under Akashi as Akashi fucked him that once and it was awful and Kuroko’s dead, still face as Akashi left was awful staring staring at the ceiling like he wasn’t aware of anything like everything had been taken from him.

Momoi was better. Tubal ligation, a snip and the slip of a knot under and through, secured forever. Fine, she said, no man could ever try to take her out as all those silly university good Japanese ladies would one day be taken out progression be damned their parents were traditionalists who would sooner see Momoi married than see her succeed at anything, anything, anything but empty nothing woman life, and she’s moved and gone to America so much the better for her, and she - and not Kuroko, had made it - made it for all her fluency in English and lack of tolerance for the sort of bullshit men like Kuroko put up with, with their stupid soy lattes and post-new-wave painted nail lie back and die little slow deaths and decaying unreal tolerance. Momoi had found some other girl, Riko Aida. 

Disowned.

That’s the sort of useful woman. They’re the girls who counterbalance all the rest of the plasmic filth Kuroko swims in.

Akashi can hear Kouki humming as he washes his hair in the shower, and Akashi sits with his shoulders propped up on the headboard and thinks.

Kuroko is loyal, kind, and Kuroko will stay, and Kuroko will remain useful and boring and obscure, though he might not have been, in some universe where a less vindictive Akashi had let him go.

And Akashi doesn’t hate himself for it. He doesn’t think he really has the capacity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Akashi did not rape Kuroko.


End file.
